


Pictures

by chaWOOPa



Series: Red Vs Blue Short Stories [20]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Fluff, M/M, proud dad Lavernius Tucker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-30 14:03:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3939541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaWOOPa/pseuds/chaWOOPa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tucker nodded and then shot up from his spot on the ground (an amazing feat for someone who had just been claiming to be dying) and grabbed Wash’s arm, dragging him back to the base. “Yep! Do you wanna see some more pictures? I have so many, some of them even from before we got separated. Me and Junior went through some UNSC training before we were allowed out in the field, but as soon as we were allowed we were always in some other solar system somewhere trying not to mess things up with aliens twice our size.” Tucker smiled and let go of a reeling Wash when they reached his room, abandoning the older man in favor of going and rooting through one of the drawers in the stand next to his bunk. “Here,” He pulled out a stack of papers held together by a rubber band and handed them to Wash “These are all the pictures and letters he sent me. You probably can’t read them, all of the words are in Sangheili.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pictures

Tucker collapsed on the ground of the canyon in his usual dramatic fashion for the third time in twenty minutes and Wash nearly smacked him. “What is it now, Drama King?”

Tucker huffed and looked up at Wash from his place in the dirt. “You are trying to kill me.”

“If I were trying to ki-”

“Oh shut up. I wasn’t done,” Tucker laughed musically, effectively distracting Wash.  Focus Wash! You are pissed off at him for trying to get out of drills. His laugh isn’t that fucking pretty, okay? Get a hold of yourself.

“What else is there to say?” Wash forced out angrily.

“You are trying to take a father from his son, aren’t you?” Tucker asked jokingly, stretching and putting his hands under his head.

“For the last time I am not-Wait what?” Wash’s eyes widened behind his visor and he looked down at Tucker.

“Shit dude, I forgot, you don’t know about Junior yet!” Tucker sat up excitedly and turned to face Wash.

“Jun-You expect me to believe that  you , Lavernius Tucker, reproduced?” Wash asked incredulously. “That poor hypothetical kid.”

“Hey, first off Fuck you, Junior isn’t fake and I was a pretty good parent, thank you very much,” Tucker pulled off his helmet and set it in the dirt next to him as he looked angrily at Wash. “Second off, Junior was-is a fantastic kid and I raised him all by myself. He wasn’t exactly human, but why should that matter? I gave him the best damn childhood I could... given our circumstances.”

Wash crossed his arms and shifted all his weight onto one foot before saying, “Once again, you expect me to believe that you,  Lavernius Tucker,  had a kid; And an Alien one at that.”

Tucker grinned up at Wash and said, “Fuck yeah! Wanna see some pictures? Junior used to send me lots of them after-well, he used to send me a lot of them and most of them have stories written on the back.” Tucker pulled a couple pictures out of a hidden pocket in his armor and showed them to Wash proudly one a time. “See, this one, this one is my favorite,” he held up a picture of an aqua colored Shanghelli and a laughing, younger version of himself.  Holy shit, he really did have a kid and is actually excited to talk about him. No, stop it,Wash, you are angry at him for- “This is me and Junior, it was the last day we had together before we had to head out on the mission where we got separated. One of Junior’s friends took it with this ancient camera called a Polaroid.Just before I sent him off, he gave it to me.” Tucker turned it to face him, not even caring about the speechless Washington standing in front of him.  Wait what was I angry about?  Tucker ran his hands over the strange writing on the bottom of the picture and said, “‘I promise to write you all the time, okay? Love you.’ That is what it says. Despite everything he managed to keep in touch with me for a while.”

Wash stood stock still, trying his hardest to remember why he was angry at Tucker.  He doesn’t think of you like that. Besides, he probably wouldn’t be able to work past the fact that you’re asexual. Every second Tucker spent looking at his picture and talking about his son, however, made it harder and harder for Wash to put a pin in his thoughts.

“This other one,” Tucker picked the other one back up and showed it to Wash “is Junior’s 5 th grade basketball team. On this one Junior wrote about how it took them nearly an hour to take the picture because the one kid named Miles kept moving around and every time they took the picture he would jump up or make weird faces and eventually all the other boys were joining in.” Tucker laughed to himself, turning the picture around to look proudly at the aqua alien in it. “I kinda miss him, you know?”

Tucker looked up and the speechless grey and yellow soldier standing in front of him. “I… How did… Is this why I couldn’t get to you when I was trying to find out what happened to the soldiers from blood gulch?”  Smooth cover-up, Wash.

Tucker nodded and then shot up from his spot on the ground (an amazing feat for someone who had just been claiming to be dying) and grabbed Wash’s arm, dragging him back to the base. “Yep! Do you wanna see some more pictures? I have so many, some of them even from before we got separated. Me and Junior went through some UNSC training before we were allowed out in the field, but as soon as we were allowed we were always in some other solar system somewhere trying not to mess things up with aliens twice our size.” Tucker smiled and let go of a reeling Wash when they reached his room, abandoning the older man in favor of going and rooting through one of the drawers in the stand next to his bunk. “Here,” He pulled out a stack of papers held together by a rubber band and handed them to Wash “These are all the pictures and letters he sent me. You probably can’t read them, all of the words are in Sangheili.”

Wash took them and sorted through as Tucker spoke. He listened to Tucker speak for a while, while he went through the many pictures. Each one was a different setting with many different people, one was even an awkward family Christmas card and Wash couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of a normal, human family all in tacky Christmas sweaters and looking terrified underneath their smiles with a rather annoyed looking alien behind them stuffed into a sweater with dogs in Santa hats dancing around the middle of the red fabric.

“-and I just… I miss him. I miss him a lot, you know? We were headed for the planet he was on when we were pulled off course and crashed here, I was going to be there in time for his birthday.” Tucker all the sudden lost the fiery happiness that he had been spouting for a while and the shift in tone snapped Wash out of his thoughts.

“I am sorry,” Wash said, looking back down at the picture in his hands. It had three people, Junior was in the middle with each hand held by a different person. On one side of him was Tucker, his dreads pulled back in a ponytail and a smile on his face bigger than Wash had ever seen as he looked lovingly to the left at the other two people in the picture. On the other side of Junior was another man Wash didn’t recognize. He was taller than Tucker, but only by a little bit, his red hair stuck up in every direction and the freckles that covered his face were almost as numerous as those that covered Wash’s. The love between the three of them was palpable even through the picture. “Who is that?” Wash pointed to the man in the picture.

Tucker grabbed the picture and looked at it for a second before turning away under the pretense of straightening out something on his nightstand. “That? Oh, that was my umm... My boyfriend. We… Well, his name was Alex. He was pretty cool, but he was sent out into the field shortly before Junior and I were. His squad was killed the day Junior and I were sent on our first mission.”

Wash suddenly felt as if having his helmet on gave him an unfair advantage on the helmet-less Tucker, so he took it off. “I am so sorry.”

“Nah, it isn’t your fault. Alex and I knew that it wasn’t going to work. He wasn’t one for long distance and he knew that he wasn’t leaving the planet on the same ship me and Junior were when we finished training. Besides, I met y-someone else I care about a lot.” Tucker stopped talking as Wash’s eyes got very big and then he reached into the stack quickly to pull out a picture of Junior and another boy arm in arm, both covered from head to toe in mud. “This one happened about a year and a half after the desert. He was hanging out with the family the UNSC had assigned his caretakers and his best friend took him out mudding. He sent me this along with a detailed letter from his caretakers telling me what had happened. They never liked me at all, a little bit of leftover racism, I think. They assumed that I was a good for nothing who was about as intelligent as a rock and no matter what always sent me letters in English that translated what Junior had written on the picture. I usually threw them away as soon as I got them.”

“Tucker what were you going to say just then?” Wash was hyper aware of the tightening in his chest and hoped against all reason that Tucker would say it. “Because it sounded a lot like-”

“Nothing,” Tucker said stiffly, sifting through the pictures again, leaving the one of him, Alex, and Junior on the bed. Wash was more than a little upset that Tucker wouldn’t say it. “I was going to tell you more about Junior. He is still the light of my life, which is part of the reason I was able to move on from Alex. He was always there to keep me going. He grew to be an even better person than I was back then, and he isn’t even a person, per say! He played basketball until about a year or two ago, then he found a colony of other Sangheili and moved in with them. He started doing a lot of things with them and his stories got a million times more interesting. Not that they weren’t a joy to hear before, they just got a whole lot stranger to me.” 

Wash walked closer to Tucker and sat on the bed next him.  What the fuck am I doing?  he asked himself as he took a deep breath and opened his mouth to speak. “You know, Tucker, I loved Maine. Not the Meta,” Wash said hastily seeing Tucker’s confused expression out of the corner of his eyes “I loved Maine, the goofball who ran around the Mother of Invention messing with the other freelancers but never pushed too far and always knew when someone needed to be cheered up. I loved the Maine who cracked jokes and smiled and talked about his little son he had adopted back on earth before he had been drafted for Project Freelancer. I loved the Maine who nearly beat York to a pulp in training the day after he threw glitter at him as he was getting out of the shower.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Tucker asked, looking down at his hands. 

Every bone in Wash’s body wanted to jump up out of Tucker’s bed and pretend that this had never happened, but he had opened his mouth and for once he wasn’t going to insert his foot in it. “Because I lost him a long time ago, just like you lost Alex. I lost him and I didn’t think I would ever be able to move on, but then I met an insufferable, rude, lazy, ass-hole who didn’t seem to care about anyone but himself until I got to know him. I didn’t think I could love someone as much or in the same way I did Maine, but you proved me wrong, and honestly I am scared out of my wits to be saying this to you because I am asexual and a dude and the person you hate most in the world right now, but that doesn’t matter because I think you were going to say, ‘I met you’ and then changed it to ‘someone I care about a lot’ and I-” Wash stopped talking when he noticed the amusement in Tucker’s eyes. “What?”

“Nothing,” he looked away for a second before looking back at Wash with a smug smile on his face, “Just that you forgot smug when you described me. Oh, and that you said the person I hate most in the world. It is quite the opposite, actually. Now,” he kissed Wash’s bright red cheek before standing and stretching, “how many more laps did I have to run?” 

Wash stayed gaping up at Tucker’s bright smile, the red on his cheeks spreading over his entire head and down his neck. “Wait what?” 

“You heard me,” Tucker said. 

Wash stared at him for a second longer before saying, “You… Holy shit was that your plan all along?” 

Tucker laughed and asked, “How many laps?” again. 

Wash shoved his helmet back on before he started grinning uncontrollably. “Ten. And if you really do feel the same about me as I do you, one extra.”

Tucker looked up at Wash’s now helmeted head and said, “And if I love you more?”

“Twenty at least,” Wash laughed. 

Tucker ran twenty-one.


End file.
